By TODD WOODYPublished: November 16, 2010SAVE THE TREES Davis, Calif., is protective of the trees that it has spent years planting to shade homes from the harsh sun in the Central Valley. IN this environmentally conscious college town, thousands of bicyclists commute each day through a carefully cultivated urban forest whose canopy shields riders and their homes from the harsh sun of this state’s Central Valley.

The intensity of that sunshine also makes Davis an attractive place to generate clean green energy from rooftop solar panels. And therein lies a conundrum. Tapping the power of the sun can also mean cutting down some of those trees.

“Davis has spent many, many decades getting trees planted and improving energy efficiency by virtue of shade trees that cool houses,” said Mitch Sears, the city’s sustainability program manager. “But if you want solar energy, it’s not rocket science that you need the sun.”

Now a San Francisco company, CleanPath Ventures, is promoting a solution to allow homeowners to keep their trees and go solar at the same time. CleanPath plans to expand its existing solar farm on the city’s outskirts and then sell “garden plots” to homeowners who would own the electricity generated by their patch of photovoltaic panels. Apartment dwellers and other residents whose homes are not suitable for rooftop solar arrays would also be able to own a piece of the power plant.

“If you moved down the block, you’d take the electricity production with you just like if you make an investment in a community garden, wherever you live you’ll benefit from what’s grown in the garden,” said Matt Cheney, a longtime financier of renewable energy and the founder of CleanPath Ventures.

Community solar power plants are seen as a way to expand the availability of renewable energy while taking advantage of the economies of scale that result from installing thousands of solar panels in a central location rather than scattered on thousands of individual homes.

“To get the energy benefits of solar there’s no reason to drill holes in a roof,” said Jim Burke, manager of the SolarShares program for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the region surrounding the state capital.

The utility, known as SMUD, started SolarShares, one of the nation’s first community solar-power-plant programs, in July 2008 when it offered customers the opportunity to buy electricity from a 1.2-megawatt photovoltaic power plant built on a turkey farm southeast of Sacramento.

“People love solar, but we required you to own a roof” and that it face a certain way, said Mr. Burke. “Multifamily buildings were usually excluded and renters were excluded.”

Then there was the tree issue.

“SMUD has planted hundreds of thousands of trees to shade rooftops and then with solar we’re saying cut them down,” he noted.

The SolarShares program gives customers the option of buying power from a half-kilowatt or a one-kilowatt portion of the solar farm. For instance, for a household that uses 2,158 kilowatt-hours a year, a one-kilowatt solar system would cover about 81 percent of their electricity consumption and cost $21.50 a month. However, the household would receive a monthly credit for the solar electricity produced that would average $13.96.

The pilot SolarShares program sold out within six months and there’s now a waiting list, according to Mr. Burke.

He said SMUD was planning a one-megawatt community solar-power plant that would be built next year and was exploring the placement of up to four megawatts of solar farms on highway rights-of-way owned by the state transportation agency.

Like a community solar farm in St. George, Utah, and a proposed solar garden in Falmouth, Mass., the CleanPath project in Davis would offer residents the chance to buy a physical part of a solar farm.

The Davis City Council in September passed a resolution supporting the expansion of an existing solar power plant, known as P.V.U.S.A. — Photovoltaics for Utility Scale Applications — from around 1 megawatt to 15 megawatts. CleanPath Ventures is seeking a federal loan guarantee to build the project, according to Mr. Cheney.

Global demand for the increasingly important "rare earth" minerals that power a range of digital products could outstrip supply by next year as dominant producer China slashes exports, analysts warn.

Australian experts say the world must find new technologies or prioritise use of the glowing or highly magnetic metals behind iPhones and flat-screen TVs, as well as eco-friendly hybrid cars, solar panels and wind turbines.

"We have a classic supply and demand crisis. Under normal conditions the global demand exceeds supply in about 2011," Professor Brent McInnes from Curtin University in Western Australia told an online briefing last week.

Demand for rare earths has soared with the popularity of smartphones and low-power light bulbs, at the same time that China, which produces 95 percent of the world's total, is limiting exports to feed its domestic market.

Trade tensions flared in September when buyers in Japan accused China of a targeted embargo in retaliation for a territorial dispute.

China gave assurances it would be a "reliable supplier" during a visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month. But Japan, the United States and other top consumers are scrambling to find new sources.

"There is a whole range of economies out there... that are building high-tech industries that are dependent at the moment on a very narrow source," said John Cole, director of the Australian Centre for Sustainable Business and Development.

But McInnes said China's actions were driven more by a need to support its growing high-tech sector rather than a desire to exert market clout.

"China sees a point in time when they will need all the rare earth elements they produce," he said.

Rare earth prices remained static for decades due to plentiful supplies, lulling the high-tech industry into a false sense of security.

But McInnes said "it's quite evident this is no longer going to be viable," with a 300 percent spike in prices over the past year alone.

"In normal economic circumstances, whenever the price of an element gets so high, you look to develop new technologies that don't need that element, or you find a new element that is more abundant," said McInnes.

Dwindling supply and increasing costs underscored the need to develop alternatives such as bio- or nano-technology, he added.

"We are at the moment looking at a phenomenon that perhaps gives us some insights into where the future might be in terms of the high-tech and particularly the green-tech sector because some of the technologies that are at risk ... largely exist in the green-tech area," McInnes said.

Cole said scarce supplies of rare earths were being routinely used on "low-value" applications such as plasma screen TVs, indicating a lack of appreciation of the resource and its potential applications.

"Health, defence, and communications applications indicate that there are "a hierarchy of technologies here that could be developed, not least of which are the green technologies," said Cole.

With an average Australian producing six kilos (12 pounds) of electronic waste each year, vast quantities of rare earth -- also used in glass, fibre optic cables and magnets -- find their way into rubbish tips, raising the possibility of recycling as a key source of the minerals.

"The optimisation of our use of rare earth demands that we fully recover the material and re-use it, and that includes even going to the extent of land-fill mining," said Cole.

Australia's Lynas Corp is on track to start producing rare earths by the third quarter of next year, with the resource-rich country expected to become one of the world's leading producers within just a few years.

Laying the track for high-speed railNovember 17, 2010 Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced the second round of recipients selected to receive funding for intercity rail projects under the administration’s High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program on October 28, 2010. These projects will bring us one step closer to realizing the benefits of greener transportation. CAP has the story.

The graph below shows the projects currently under development as a result of the High-Speed Intercity Rail Program’s funding, which includes Recovery Act funding and funding from the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008. Some projects are in the planning stages while others such as California’s existing corridors (solid red) are already built and are being developed or expanded. The Milwaukee to Madison line and projects in Ohio will likely be canceled by incoming governors for those states (see “Passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future”: New GOP governors kill $1.2 Billion in high-speed rail jobs).

This is a shame, because these projects create jobs. The California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates that building the corridor connecting San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento will create 600,000 jobs.

Intercity passenger rail received $8 billion total from the Recovery Act, which is a huge increase in funding. It traditionally receives much less federal funding than highways and air travel.

We’ve written in this space before about the Obama administration’s new emphasis on building high-speed and intercity passenger rail that connects communities and economic centers around the country, and complements highway, aviation, and public transit systems. But there are other benefits to high-speed rail: It spurs job creation, decreases dependence on fossil fuels, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Intercity rail, some of which is high speed, is also more energy efficient than commuter rail systems—and much more efficient than automobiles or aircraft when compared using British thermal units, or BTUs per passenger mile.

A national high-speed rail system is a long way off, but even systems that connect a few major cities pay environmental dividends. The California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates that their proposed system from Los Angeles to San Francisco will remove 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year by 2030 because it uses electricity generated from wind, solar, and other renewable resources. And it will save 12.7 million barrels of oil by 2030.

Those kinds of benefits combined with high-speed rail’s job-creation potential make the administration’s investments a worthy endeavor.

The peak oil crisis: Did we vote ourselves to extinction? by Tom Whipple

The disconnect between the American body politic and reality grows larger every day.

In reviewing hundreds of pages of commentary on the election, one searches in vain for analysis that even come close to describing what is happening to the nation - i.e. we are in the midst of a massive deflating credit bubble and running short of affordable liquid fuels at the same time. There seems to be general agreement that the new balance of power in Washington means two years of gridlock. Despite an occasional bow in the direction of bi-partisanship, the new majority in the house is saying quite openly that it will work to lower taxes, cut spending, will stop any efforts to deal with climate change, and will spend the next two years investigating everything it can about the Obama administration in hopes it will be so discredited in two years that the President can't possibly win another term. Whether this agenda is what the voters thought they would get on November 2 when they voted yet again for change is another question.

Upon assuming office, the Obama administration faced the biggest choice of any American President since Lincoln -- either face up to the fact that the industrial age, with its mantra of endless economic growth, was over and start making preparations for a new era, or try to revive the economy. Apparently the new President, unwilling to grapple with the downsizing of civilization, chose to prolong the deteriorating industrial economy for a few more years by increasing deficit spending, attempting to reform health care, and resorting to various monetary tactics that may or may not keep the financial system from ultimately collapsing. The basis of the problem is that without steadily increasing amounts of cheap energy, reviving economic growth as we know it is simply not sustainable for long. Borrowing and printing trillions of dollars may briefly slow the decline, but little more.

The trillions spent on bailouts and stimulation kept the illusion of recovery going for some months, but did little to increase employment or reverse the disintegration of the inflated housing market. Some polls show nearly half of US households have been seriously affected in some manner by the adverse economic conditions, yet the administration continued to express optimism rather than realism. In November of 2009 and 2010, the people spoke and the Congress and many statehouses were populated with many new faces. In most cases these newly elected officials had even less idea how the situation could be fixed, but they were new and that gave the voters a ray of hope.

The one policy area where the Obama administration tried to make major changes was in dealing with global warming by controlling carbon emissions. It is interesting that an issue on which there should be universal agreement - saving life on the planet - managed to degenerate into an imbroglio which approaches religious fanaticism. The reason of course is that controlling emissions is now thought by many as synonymous with further job losses.

Although a stream of studies conclude that global temperatures are rising, ice is melting everywhere, and people who study such things say increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere are to blame, over half of America believes man-made global warming is a giant hoax. A recent Pew poll says that only 37 percent of Americans and 41 percent of the Chinese believe global warming is a serious problem. Only in Pakistan, which ironically is on the cusp of being done in by global warming, and Poland of all places, are people said to be less worried than here in the U.S.

So where is all this leading? The new House majority can't cut the interest on the national debt, will be viscerally reluctant to make serious cuts in defense spending, and is unlike to have the stomach to make serious cuts in entitlements. Therefore, it will likely content itself with chopping a few marquis spending programs such as earmarks, declare victory, and go back to preparing for the 2012 elections. There is even a good chance that they will still be preparing when the next oil price spike occurs. If the spike is high enough and lasts long enough it could enter into the political debates in the 2012 election. But it really doesn't matter; very high oil prices are going to do serious harm to the economy one of these days, and when they come, the realistic discussions can begin as to what we can do.

Unfortunately the most serious of all issues facing us in the long run could turn out to be the failure of the United States to exercise any sort of leadership on emissions controls. As matters stand right now the new majority in the House of Representatives seems dead set on any kind of controls and says it will do its utmost to prevent the administration from controlling emissions administratively.

Now a few years or even a few decades of unchecked carbon emissions may not be of consequence. The problem, however, is: what if, as many believe, we are nearing a carbon tipping point. Some climate scientists say that an average global increase of 6o C will leave the earth uninhabitable. Long before we get there, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms and what have you will make life very unpleasant for those of us still around or our descendants. Someday, those who are left will wonder just what we were thinking about when we let all this happen.

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.energybulletin.net

The commercial corn business, says Sheila Bair of the FDIC, seems to be inflating another one of those hot air market bubbles (my words, not hers). If it bursts, it will leave the financial landscape of the cornbelt looking as forlorn as a field of dead cornstalks. As Otto Doering, a farm economist at Purdue says about the situation in Farm and Dairy newspaper on Nov 11: “We are now at the bottom of the hole and there is nothing that the Republicans or Democrats can do at this point to dig us out quickly. We’re in a hole that we’ve been digging ourselves into for at least 20 years.”

But the farm press blithely says that farmers are having a great year. The price of corn was up to nearly six dollars a bushel last week. A hard- working thief could make $30 an hour stealing corn out of the field at that price. Land to grow corn on (not to mention soybeans and wheat whose markets are also going crazy) is being bid up to $6000 -$8000 an acre while the prices of fertilizer, seed and chemicals are double-digiting upward just as fast. If there is anything rational about this market, food prices, especially meat, must go up significantly. I sure don’t want to be a representative of the people when Americans have to start paying double what they do now for a steak.

Then, last Friday, Nov. 12, corn prices fell the limit. The doomsayers said the long-awaited price plunge was finally under way. This week the price is pogo-sticking up and down all over the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, mystifying traders themselves and totally bewildering onlookers like myself. What in the world is going on here?

I’ll tell you my crazy corn theories if you will tell me yours. First of all, I think that the situation is similar to the housing market a couple of years ago. Low interest rates encouraged people to buy houses they couldn’t afford and the same thing is happening in the farm equipment and farm land markets. Secondly Asians are learning that they like meat just as much as we do, but how can anybody afford to buy corn to make meat when it is six dollars a bushel even before it gets shipped half way around the world? Thirdly, pension funders, insurance companies, and some billionaires are speculating in the grain market because it looks like a better deal than the stock market. Fourthly, and most importantly, top notch, large-scale farmers think they can hang in there no matter what, not only because of the above reasons but because they have a golden parachute safety net. They are heavily subsidized. The government, as Doering (above) points out, in 1996 shifted from cyclical subsidy payments to direct payments. Instead of paying farmers subsidies on crops when prices were deemed too low to be profitable, Uncle now pays qualifying farmers a subsidy whether market prices are high or low. Then in 2000, Congress re-introduced cyclical payments, calling them counter-cyclical, whatever that means, but left direct payments in place! Even the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, Colin Peterson, says that’s a mistake and wants to drop direct payments. Fat chance.

Corn is the most wonderful food plant ever developed which is why we start depending on it too much, as the Mayan and the mound-building Mississippian civilizations both did before they collapsed. Corn makes a succulent vegetable on or off the cob, makes cornmeal, hoecake, cornbread, cornpone, mush, batter, popcorn, parched corn and hominy. Now it’s a major source of sugar— high fructose corn syrup. More importantly, corn is the principle animal feed to make meat, milk, cream, cheese and butter. Last but not least, corn makes great beer and whiskey.

So are we happy with our miracle food? No. We had to overdo it. We decided on the ultimate insanity: to feed our cars, trucks, and airplanes with it too. This doesn’t distill out on a large, industrial scale as we are learning the hard way. Ethanol plants are declaring bankruptcy right and left. We will need our land for food, not fuel. Recognizing that fact, a consortium of food industry associations has just petitioned Congress to disallow the recent legislation that permits sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol instead of the 10% now in effect. Corn is for feeding people, not cars.

We literally live in a corn economy and money speculators are pricing it out of the marketplace. We will either pay a whole lot more to eat or a whole bunch of investors in farm land and grain markets will be wearing empty beer barrels to work instead of suits and ties.

So, last night CBS hauled Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, on board their flagship Sunday infotainment vehicle, 60 Minutes, to blow a mighty wind up America's ass (as they say in professional PR circles). America is lately addicted to lying to itself, and 60 Minutes has become the "go-to" patsy for funneling disinformation into an already hopelessly confused, wishful, delusional, US public.

McClendon told the credulous Leslie Stahl and the huge viewing audience that America "has two Saudi Arabia's of gas." Now, you know immediately that at least half the viewers misconstrued this statement to mean that we have two Saudi Arabia's of gasoline. Translation: don't worry none about driving anywhere you like, or having to get some tiny little pansy-ass hybrid whatchamacallit car to do it in, and especially don't pay no attention to them "green" sumbitches on the sidelines trying to sell you some kind of peak oil story.... It also prepared the public to support whatever Mr. McClendon's company wants to do, because he says his company will free America from its slavery to OPEC. By the way, CBS never clarified these parts of the story by the end of the show.

First of all, they are talking about methane gas, not liquid gasoline or oil. There are large deposits of methane gas locked into shale deposits roughly following the Appalachian mountain chain from New York State through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, into Ohio, but also hot spots out west. It's hard to get at. You have to basically blow up the shale rock deep underground with high pressure water that is loaded up with chemicals and sand particles to keep the rock fragments separated once they are blown apart. Chesapeake Energy specializes in this rock fracturing (or "fracking") method for drilling. You can get gas out of the ground this way. The question is how much, over what time period, at what cost.

At the present time, with America anxious about any kind of future energy, shale gas sounds like a dream-come-true. Mostly what the public saw on 60 Minutes last night was a sell-job for Chesapeake Energy to boost its stock price. Here are some facts:

• Over a 50 year period ahead, all the shale gas drilling of the Marcellus fields in New York State will produce the equivalent of three years US consumption at 2008 levels.

• A price of $8 per unit is required to make shale gas fracking economically viable in theory even for a short time. Gas is currently around $4. Expect to pay at least twice as much for gas.

• Even at higher costs, shale gas fracking is arguably uneconomical. It requires huge numbers of rigs, generally 8 wells per "pad," meaning very high capital investments. The wells produce nicely for a year, average, and then deplete very steeply - meaning you get a lot of money up front and very soon all that capital investment is a wash. Translation: Chesapeake can make a lot quick money over the next few years of intense drilling and they don't care what happens after that.

• Chesapeake itself estimates that 5.5 million gallons of fresh water are needed per well, often delivered in trucks, which require fuel.

• It takes three years, average to prepare a drilling "pad" and the up to 12 wells on it, working 24/7 in rural areas with significant noise and electric lighting

• The fracking fluid is a secret proprietary cocktail formula amounting to 5 percent of the liquid injected into the earth. It's composed of: sand; a jelling agent to suspend the sand because water is not "thick" enough; biocides to kill bacteria that thrive in jelling agent; "breakers" to thin out jell-thickened water after fracking to get the fluid out of the way of released gas and improve "flowback;" fluid-loss additives to decrease "leak-off" of fracking fluid into rock; anti-corrosives to protect metal in wells; and friction reducers to promote high pressures and high flow rates. Of the 5.5 million gallons of fluid injected into each well, 27,500 gallons is the chemical cocktail.

• Mr. McClendon said on 60 Minutes that it couldn't possibly harm the public's water supply because they were drilling so far below the 1000-foot-deep maximum of most water wells. He left out the fact that they have to drill through those drinking water layers to get down to the shale gas, and pump the fracking fluid through it, and then get the gas up through it. He also left out the fact that the concrete casings of drill holes sometimes crack and leak at any depth.

• The fracking fluid cannot be re-used. You have to mix new cocktail fluid for each injection.

• "Flowback" fluid inevitably comes back up with the gas, sometimes spilling over the ground. In any case, the stuff that does come back up is stored on the surface in lagoons. Often it contains heavy metals, salts, and radioactive material from drilling through strata of radon-bearing granite and other layers. Liners of flowback fluid lagoons have been known to fail.

• Gas well failures in Pennsylvania, where production was ramped up quickest in recent years, have ended up polluting well water to the degree that residents can no longer use their wells.

• Little is known about the migration of fracking fluids underground.

It seems to me that the chief mass delusion associated with this touted "bonanza" is that Americans would supposedly be able to shift to driving cars that run on natural gas. I believe they will be hugely disappointed. Between the cost of fracking production (and its poor economics), gearing up the manufacture of a new type universal car engine, and installing the infrastructure for methane gas fill-ups - not to mention the supply operation by either new pipelines or trucks carrying liquefied methane gas, we will discover that a.) America lacks the capital, and b.) that households will be too broke to change out the entire US car fleet.

What this disgusting episode really shows is how eager the USA is to mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, including massive collective self-deception. The lying starts at the very top, not just in Aubrey McClendon's office at Chespeake, but in every executive suite throughout the land - including the Oval Office - where any lie is automatically swallowed and then upchucked for public consumption in the interest of keeping a nation based on addictive rackets stumbling on without having to change our behavior.

Editorial NotesNo one does outrage like James Kunstler.

"A coal seam gas and fracking story from the Australian version of Sixty Minutes. Not too bad. Transcript and video." [hat tip to AB]sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au

westexas on November 18, 2010 - 9:33am Can anyone think of any examples of countries that hit a production peak/plateau--and that failed to show a new production high within three years--that subsequently had a new and higher production peak?

“Twilight in the desert” is a book summing up the arguments of a Texan oil banker who suggests that Saudi Arabia is overestimating its future oil production capacity. I’ve learned through the American Department of Defense that this book is the source of two recent Pentagon reports envisaging a severe lack of oil starting in 2012 and continuing until 2015 at least.

Matthew Simmons, who wrote “Twilight in the desert, published in 2005, died in august at the age of 67. His analysis remain a major piece of the peak oil debate.

... The advisory staff of the American armed services seems to consider the fears of Mr. Simmons as well-founded and credible, and based on this, the staff has produced a prognosis of a “severe energy crisis” that is potentially inevitable.

Two biannual reports, having appeared in 2008 and in 2010, describe the “environment” of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JOE reports stand for Joint Operating Environment). They occupy an important place, in this reporter’s opinion, among the recent analyses recognizing the eventuality (or stating the threat) of a fall in the world oil production between now and the middle of this decade.

... The JOE2008 and JOE2010 reports don’t indicate the sources that enabled them to put out this warning (they don’t even mention the names of their authors). Their main author, Joe Purser, Joint Futures Group director at the US Joint Forces Command, did not reply to my questions.

Nevertheless, Kathleen Jabs, head of the press office of the Joint Forces Command, indicates by e-mail that Mr. Purser says “that he had access to a presentation of “Twilight in the Desert” that Matt Simmons gave to Pentagon personnel in February, 2008.”.

Kathleen Jabs states that the two other sources of the JOE2008 and JOE2010 reports are from data furnished by the International Energy Agency, and from an analysis group in the American Department of Energy, the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

For the complete article, see Matthieu's post at Le Monde

Editorial NotesMatthieu Auzanneau is a French journalist who has been aggressively covering the peak oil story. He posts in French and (some) English at his blog at Le Monde: Oil Man. Reading or linking to the article at his site increases the payments he receives from Le Monde and helps him finance his good work.

The article was originally published in French on November 13. Thanks to several Energy Bulletin readers who helped with the translation into English.